A Culture of Healing: Practical Steps to Support Students and Educators in the Face of Collective and Individual Trauma

Introduction

The research on educator trauma, workplace stress and childhood trauma have become prevalent over the last several decades, suggesting strong correlations between teacher stress and trauma, poor work environment, teacher burnout, teacher attrition, and poor student achievement. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Quality of Work Life Survey (2017) report acknowledged, “schools still struggle to provide educators and, by extension, students with healthy and productive environments. Districts that fail to recognize the importance of educator well-being may be faced with higher [teacher] turnover … and greater burnout,” which directly impacts students. Furthermore, the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and the increasingly clear systemic racial injustices have compounded and intensified existing economic hardships and resource instability of families in need, thereby introducing new layers of trauma and toxic stress. The intersection of these complex and dynamic issues contributing to educator, student, and community trauma warrant examination and the development of strategies to address trauma responses during and well beyond the aforementioned crises.

The daily lives and normalcy of students, teachers, and families were disrupted as schools across the country abruptly shut down in March of 2020, causing a collective level of trauma. A middle school band director in Mississippi somberly described the pandemic events while comparing it to Hurricane Katrina of 2005: “The crisis is different, but the trauma is in many ways the same: the sense of loss, the emotional and economic hardships and the threat of illness [has brought] uncertainty about what the future is going to bring” (Walker, 2020). To compound the effects of the early stages of the 2020 pandemic and national quarantine, media footage of a police arrest of an African-American man surfaced, followed by headlines amplifying the following: “The U.S. has been convulsed by nationwide protests over the death of an African-American man in police custody” (British Broadcasting Corporation [BBC], 2020). The incident itself, while particularly traumatic to African-American populations across the country, was one among several similar incidents that led to a critical mass in the social conscience of the nation. The incident sparked sweeping discussion within the nation’s institutions (educational and non-educational alike), creating the need to address how fairly or equitably historically marginalized and underrepresented minorities have been treated.

Wading through the effects of these prevailing national crises, educators have had to work intensively to meet the needs of their students while operationally pivoting from face-to-face learning to online and e-learning platforms and while dealing with personal, familial, and professional stress and trauma themselves. After a crisis event causing a school shutdown, such as the pandemic, “we instinctively think first about the students, then about the educators … delivering online classes for the first time, which comes with its own set of stressors” (Quick, 2020). Quick points out that like the airplane safety briefings that instruct passengers to put on their oxygen masks before helping others, the same should be true in a crisis like the pandemic. Instead, the educators tasked with being a support to students amidst the imposed changes bypassed the time needed to take care of their own physical and social emotional health in order to “effectively and sustainably support students both during and after this crisis” (Quick, 2020).

According to the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN), for some children, the pandemic could have compounded “pre-existing trauma, adversity, and disparities … which include increased risk for violence and abuse in the home” (2020). This pre-existing trauma has been labeled in research conducted by Kaiser Permanente and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). For others, the pandemic has introduced new traumatic stress experiences. The duration of the pandemic has placed many students in a state of having to manage:

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  Loss of predictability

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  Disrupted sleep - wake patterns

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  Disrupted learning

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  The switch from face-to-face to virtual instruction

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  Lack of access to educational resources

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  Heightened awareness of adverse home circumstances

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  Loss of an environment that students have viewed as a safe zone